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A morning with Magento 2

Recently, we co-­hosted a breakfast event with DotMailer and UKFast to introduce merchants to the recently launched Magento 2 ecommerce platform.

The atmosphere was exciting and the air was sweet – sweet with the smell of coffee and fresh croissants, and topped off with a brilliant view of London.

Ben Marks – Getting to grips with Magento 2

Magento’s official evangelist, Ben Marks, literally came straight from the airport to join us. And after a brief introduction from Jon Woodall, our Managing Director, Ben took to the podium to talk about what Magento 2 means for merchants and developers.

Key out-takes:

Magento 2 involved a long series of consultations and reviews by the open­source community of Magento developers, to make it stronger and more bulletproof.

The new Magento 2 Marketplace will launch in Q1 with about 170 extensions, and many more on the way.

The first Magento 2 patch has already been released (2.0.0.1), which made it compatible with PHP 7 out of the box.

The second Magento 2 patch is due very soon (2.0.0.2), though there is an air of anticipation on what that will entail.

Since launching in November, there have been over 120,000 downloads of Magento 2 Community Edition!

Expert panel – Q&A

This was followed by an expert panel discussion about Magento 2, whilst Jon moderated.

The panel:

Ben Marks, Magento Evangelist

Myself, Mitch Goldman, Organizer of the London Magento User Group and Space 48’s London General Manager

Tony Brown, Technical Director at Space48

Sharon Head, Chief Operating Officer at DotMailer

Adam Cade, Development Operations at UKFast

Key out-takes:

DotMailer is the first and only Magento Platinum technology partner.

When upgrading to Magento 2, themes will need to be redeveloped. There is no simple code conversion for migrating themes from Magento 1 to Magento 2.

There is no silver bullet answer to “When should I upgrade to Magento 2?” The answer will be different for each merchant’s circumstances.

Patching and updating Magento 2 should be somewhat less painful than it was in Magento 1.

Magento’s development roadmap is a stressful question for Ben – he actually broke the handle off his coffee mug answering it!

Magento is working on further core add ons to Magento 2: B2B, Order Management and Retail Associate platform.

Mitch Goldman – Magento 2 walk through

Lastly, I did a walkthrough of Magento 2’s new responsive front end and checkout, plus Magento 2 Admin’s new look and functionality.

Following on from the live demo, the morning was wrapped up with more coffee, pastries and networking … before waving a fond farewell to Ben who had to head back to the airport.

In summary, a Morning With Magento 2 was a great event; we thoroughly enjoyed sharing our knowledge and giving merchants an opportunity to get to grips with Magento 2. If you weren’t able to make it to the event, make sure you check out the video footage from the day.